A Temporary Lapse in Judgement
by Igorina
Summary: A cautionary tale of two bounty hunters, an unorthodox drinking game and one hell of an embarrassing morning after. Cad Bane x Aurra Sing.


Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or settings to be found herein.

A/N: Complete crack and doubtless completely OOC. I know that drunk!Bane's been done by several other people before, but I just couldn't resist doing a 'morning after' take.

-0-

As Cad Bane emerged from the blessed haven of unconsciousness into the not-so-blessed realm of the morning after the night before, he became instantly aware of three salient facts. The first, that a hoard of angry pygmy rancors seemed to be charging relentlessly against the inside of his skull. The second, that he was wearing his boots, hat, blaster holsters and not a stitch more. And the third, that he was slumped over a body: a living, breathing and very naked body.

Unable to bring himself to open his eyes and allow the harsh, unforgiving light of the Keyorin dawn to fuel the rampaging racors in his head, he used his right hand to make a rudimentary investigation of the body underneath him.

To his relief it was clearly humanoid (and not – thank all the deities in the galaxy – Hutt shaped); indicating that he had at least not made a repeat of his last drunken folly (he'd had to terminate sixty-seven separate individuals and ninety-eight droids in order stop _that_ one from getting out). It was also clearly female and in good shape, with a firm ass, taut belly, nicely proportioned tits and... and a set of abnormally long fingers that appeared to be making a haphazard exploration of his back.

He groaned, a queasy feeling not directly connected to the copious amounts of strong liquor in which he'd quite obviously partaken in the previous night stirring in his gut.

Still, one had to be rational; there were probably lots of women in the galaxy with fingers like that: hell, there were probably whole planets full of them. There was no reason whatsoever to think he'd been stupid enough or suicidal enough to...

The body shifted and he became cognizant that his left hand was pressing against what felt to be a very thin metal rod.

A distinctly antenna-like thin metal rod.

Eyes snapping open, he sat bolt upright to find his worst fears confirmed in the form of a slender, very pale woman with a topknot of reddish-brown hair protruding from an otherwise bald skull.

"Aurra?"

"Bane?"

For several seconds the known galaxy's most infamous living bounty hunter and the known galaxy's second most infamous living bounty hunter stared at one another in what could only be described as total and utter horror.

Surely they couldn't... they hadn't...

Then, despite Bane's dearest wishes to the contrary, the events of the previous night began to flood back.

He'd walked into a bar, one of the many grimy, nondescript little places that littered the port, looking for a convenient place to privately lament the failure of his last job. He hadn't known that Sing was on Keyorin, but had clocked her immediately, sitting alone in a darkened corner with an appallingly smug expression on her face. Had she not also simultaneously clocked him, he would have walked straight back out and found another place in which to engage in a bit (or maybe a lot) of solitary drinking. Alas, she had, and it really wouldn't do to give her the idea that her presence alone was enough to send him away. Cad Bane was the galaxy's premier bounty hunter and he wasn't about to let the upstart psychopath think otherwise. So he'd gone over and tipped his hat and asked her how business was going. Not a question that should have led to anything but a brief and rather terse exchange, but she'd been in a surprisingly good mood: something to do with obtaining another trophy lightsaber for her little collection. He'd been tempted, on hearing this, to speculate outloud that her uncharacteristic amicability was the result of her finally finding one with a vibrate setting, but had managed to restrain himself – if only he hadn't, he would have awoken that morning with nothing worse than a broken nose and a couple of black eyes. Then... then, not wanting to seem down on his luck (despite the latest costly run-in with Skywalker and his damned padawan) he'd ordered drinks for both of them and done a little light bragging about a job he'd recently pulled on Nar Shadaar, and Aurra, clearly not wanting to outdone, had returned the drinks-buying favour threefold and – with rather too much self-satisfaction – detailed a few recent kills.

She had also, obviously a little tipsy at this point, made a comment about her antenna picking up the most hysterically funny calls on the local holonet sex line.

Bane shouldn't have asked for details, he really shouldn't. But by then he'd been feeling mellow and magnanimous and – when it came down to it – just a little intrigued; and so he had and she'd handed him an earpiece and, after several minutes of listening to a Dug expound upon his deepest, darkest desires to a reconditioned BD-3000 droid doing a below par imitation of a Twi'lek bar girl, they'd somehow decided to make a drinking game of it. The rules of the game had been a little ill defined, something along the lines of: 'drink a shot each time you don't correctly guess the next caller's species and weird fetish' and pretty soon they were both three (or maybe even four, five or six) sheets to the wind and merrier than a pack of Gammoreans in a mud pit.

Around the sixth or seventh call (a Zabrak fantasising about some harsh discipline at the hands of a strict Nemoidian tax collector) it had started to dawn on Bane that Aurra was actually a very attractive woman. Oh sure, there was the homicidal mania and the general sense that she'd detach your sex organs from your body as soon as look at you, but she had damned fine rear and a pair of tits you could happily bury your face in; and thus, right there and then, she'd seemed like the most desirable individual he'd ever set eyes on (despite the fact that if he stopped focusing hard enough he could only see two rather indistinct versions of her). He had told her this, in what he thought was a very smooth and charming sort of way, and – being in much the same state of inebriation as himself – she had actually seemed charmed.

And that was how he, Cad Bane: Bounty Hunter Extraordinaire, had ended up in bed with a sometimes colleague, sometimes rival, whose grasp on sanity was about as tenuous as Senator Expen Dee Bell's claims that he'd genuinely thought that that house of pleasure he'd been secretly filmed in was a local chapter of 'The Campaign For the Furtherance of Moral Decency in the Republic' (Bane didn't usually do 'divorce work', feeling it a bit beneath a hunter of his calibre, but the price the good senator's wife had put on his head was almost enough to tempt him).

Eventually it was it was Aurra who broke the horrified silence.

"This didn't happen," she said firmly, shoving him off her, getting to her feet and scooping up her orange jumpsuit from the floor.

"Right," he agreed, unable to keep himself from wondering why the hell his boots were on but his trousers were on the other side of the dingy hotel room. Everything after the bar was still a blur of skin on skin and sharp fingernail raking down his back. It was, on balance, probably better than it stayed that way. "Nothing happened and there's nobody who can say otherwise."

"Good. I'm glad that we agree." Implicit in her tones was the notion that not agreeing would directly lead to his rapid ascension to the afterlife. He couldn't help but inwardly snort at this. Sing was good at what she did, but she wasn't as good as him. No reason to unnecessarily antagonise her though, not when he might need to partner up with a competent sniper in the near future.

Wordlessly, she dressed and left; not willing to let her total mortification show, but not willing to look him in the eye either.

As she slammed the door behind her, he groaned. He really had to start keeping away from the bottle. Still, at least there hadn't been any actual witnesses to the act itself this time. Nobody had seen anything other than two professionals go into the same room. Nothing unusual about that. And if they had been leaning against one another a little more intimately than one would expect, then so what. Lots of reasons why a pair of brutal contract killers might lean against each other: injury, for instance, or fear of the other making off with the loot.

With this semi-comforting thought in his mind he sank back, shut his eyes and tried to will away the pounding, rancor rampage of a headache.

Had the blood in his ears not been pumping quite so vigorously he might have heard the sound of 'something' moving in the hotel's ancient ventilation system. Had he done so and deigned to investigate further, he might have apprehended an eye-patch wearing Patrolian carrying several thousand credits worth of surveillance equipment.

As it was, he didn't and so Robonino, now in possession of a recording that would quite possibly make him so rich that he'd never be forced to endure the moniker 'Bubble Brain' again, headed towards his ship, a huge leering grin on his face. He'd briefly considered blackmail, but had very quickly come to the conclusion that trying that would very quickly lead to his own painful demise. No, this one was going straight onto galactic pay-per-view and, with any luck, the two most infamous living bounty hunters in the known galaxy would never realise who was responsible for bringing their exploits to the masses.


End file.
